The picture shows the front page of edX. And we’ve been waiting a month to get on that front page – they put us on around 36 hours before we go live. Thanks edX! The numbers will be boosted a bit.

This post is going to be a bit reflective, but that is what blogs are for.

Why did the PolyU get into MOOCs?

My belief is that the PolyU got into MOOCs because it is (was?) the current trend and it did not want to be left behind; it wanted to show that it was up there with the Harvards and MITs; at the same time it was supposedly joining the edX club, and mixing with those top ranked universities.

Why did the ELC get into MOOCs?

We were asked to. What would have happened if we had said no? I think there would have probably been a lack of volunteers, so in that sense the PolyU were fortunate to have us.

Were we right to get into MOOCs?

I think all the teams have collectively learnt a great deal. The PolyU’s brand has been enhanced somewhat, but maybe not to the extent that was hoped a couple of years ago. The ELC, along with HKUST EC, is one of a very small number of English Centres around the world that have launched a MOOC. Something we can be proud of.

Have we missed the boat?

MOOCs were a trend, and there is a question now as to whether we have gone past the peak. One of the problems we have had with our MOOC starting in October is that there are apparently 398 other courses (Clcik on the link – Class Central had some very kind words for me) starting the same month. The market is getting saturated. We were told to find a niche market, but we decided our title 10 months ago, and now even edX has competing MOOCs on job interviews, let alone all the other MOOC providers. The numbers are not going to get less in the future, and this means getting the high number of enrollees is likely to be increasingly difficult.

Quality or Quantity

I’ve had a few conversations about this over the last couple of months, and some more very kind words have been said. MOOCs are supposed to be massive, so if you don’t attract massive numbers, then are you a success? At the same time, how important is quality? More of that on another day.

Marketing?

We were told marketing was important early on, but I did not realise how important, and how little I know about it. Problems we have had – getting traditional media interested in the story; the continuing importance of traditional media in getting a story noticed; how a story can be easily lost in social media; how it is very easy to spend, and lose money advertising on Facebook, AdWords and YouTube; we now know how to get YouTube views and Facebook likes, but we also know that does not translate into enrollees; we’ve learnt about dealing with print shops; we know more about Adobe and making posters; we have developed partnerships with Chinese suppliers, and I’ve learned to trust people I only know on Wechat! And then, at the end of the day, if I had done nothing at all – what would the numbers be like?

Video Making?

We were first told to make a 4 minute trailer video. It had to be glossy. Like an advert. Ours came in at 3:34. Too long we were then told! So we cut it, and it came in at 1:22:

Do I regret the money and time spent making it? Not really. The whole experience in total was immensely enjoyable, and I’ve learnt more in these past few months than at probably any other time in my life. Yes, totally exhausting and at time very frustrating. And yes, that energy could have been spent elsewhere. But, I’m still happy that the videos and the courses are there.

And that was only one (or two!) of the videos we made. We made dozens and dozens of them. In truth I’ve lost count. The video company did send me a long list, but that’s another story. Lessons learned: keep it simple, and do as much as you can in-house to keep control – especially with videos which need a lot of annotations. But, when you do it yourself, the main thing is sound quality. And keep the camera in focus!

On edX?

I wonder what their plan is. They have 5 million students now, although most are probably not active; still, not a bad number. And these are by and large young (our average student age is 25), highly educated (first degree or higher), and therefore potentially very high earners. And they have them. Not PolyU. Not HKU. Not HKUST. We supply the courses, and we pay to get them on edX, and we pay to get them created, but edX has this marketers dream mailing list. Good deal for them. They are promoting the verified certificate now – probably a sign of things to come.

On MOOCs?

The future of MOOCs. This could be a post in itself, so I’ll try to keep this short. The idea of providing top-class free education to those who would otherwise not have access is a great idea, and too some extent MOOCs achieve this. But, then you look at who usually joins MOOCs, and it is highly educated western males (although on our MOOC, it is highly educated Indian males!). I believe other universities will be more careful in the coming years of joining organisations like edX, and instead more local versions (such as CU KEEP) will become more popular. I think the free model will also gradually disappear, and instead there will be a limited access free version, and a paid for full version.

It was done using VideoScribe. It’s pretty easy to use, but more like a prezi than powtoon which we have been using.

My audio recording was not too good – should have recorded at a higher level. I tried to add backing music to hide some of the hiss – again not very successfully, but all part of the learning process. Finally, I realise I am speaking far to fast. Something else to learn.

What are the big challenges in education around the World? How do we ensure everyone learns to the best of their ability? Is new technology the answer? And what does it mean for teachers and pupils? Exploring future learning, educational and creative leader Sir Ken Robinson, Professor of educational technology Sugata Mitra and Professor of cognitive science and computer science and engineering Scott Klemmer.

This chapter looks at the design of a MOOC. Some useful defintions are provided:

cMOOCs: explore pedagogies and emphasise connectedness, collaborative learning; do not run on a single platform (but are distributed across many).promote immersion and are more disruptive than xMOOCs. They are not designed to serve the mission of a given institution.Key activities in cMOOCs include the remixing, repurposing and co-creation of content and interaction.xMOOCs: extend standard classroom inspired institutional educational models; promote participant diversity, in the sense of transmitting the same message to thousands, whereas cMOOCs focus more on the diversity of approaches and resources, developed and distributed in many different ways.LMOOCs: Language MOOCs

And this quote about teaching and learning languages:

When considering LMOOCs, learning a language requires the development of competences related to four different kinds of language activities (Council of Europe, 2001): reception (listening and reading), production (spoken and written), interaction (spoken and written), and mediation (translating and interpreting).

So, how to put all that together, in our Language MOOC? This is how Read concludes:

A middle ground is required that enables a hybrid-xMOOC to be designed, including cMOOC features, such as external social media tools, and the like, going beyond the limitations of the basic tools provided in the platform to provide a finer grained level of interaction. This is not just a question of linking in Twitter and/or Facebook to an existent LMOOC, and including some activities that makes use of them, but more of a fundamental restructuring of the course to move the emphasis of study away from working in the platform by watching a series of video recordings, undertaking superficial activities and doing automatically corrected tests, toward a semi-distributed cMOOC-like structure, where the students undertake a lot of their own content curation and productive skill development off the platform, and then come back to share with the group what has been happening and prepare for the next step in the learning process.